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Explosive Toffee

Maple syrup, sugar, baking sodaThis was a very quick recipe that we did Mother’s Day weekend while entertaining family… and then again last week so we could capture more pictures. The procedure was straightforward. Mix sugar, maple syrup and water in a pot, bring to hard crack stage, then adding baking soda and stir. Voila! The only issue we encountered was that the initial saucepan we chose was too small–so the second time around, we used a larger pot. The ingredients were transferred to a large pot and brought to temperature.

The boiling mixture took a while to reach temperature, and the bubbles changed over time. They went from looking like this…to this!After we added baking powder the mixture did appear to explode!It was really interesting to see the dark caramel lighten in colour and puff up with the addition of baking soda. The toffee was then transferred to a parchment paper lined pan to cool.This turned out to be delicious! The toffee was rock hard and easy to snap, and had nice little bubbles inside. We thought it would be cool to try to capture a picture of this explosive toffee exploding, so we set out to throw toffee at the ground for about 30 minutes. The results were really fun and the process strangely cathartic!

Doing this recipe was surprisingly fun, it was hard to get pictures of it in action since you have to move quickly with candy though. We got the idea to smash it on the ground from the photographer that did Modernist Cuisine’s pictures. In his video, he took high speed videos of gelatine cubes being smashed onto a hard surface. Maybe one day we’ll get that intense with our pictures!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n5AfHYST6E

I haven’t bought Modernist Cuisine, but I’ve downloaded the torrent. 🙂 I really they’re fresh take of cooking. I made a gazpacho recently from tomato water and spheriphication. It was really fun to eat. One day I’ll get to those pictures.

We don’t own the Modernist Cuisine book either, we watched some videos from the photographer about the methods they used to get certain effects. We have yet to practice any form of modernist techniques (except sous vide). Toque doesn’t really use too many modernist techniques… But the next book we might undertake would be elBulli and they are technique heavy!